But AVFM’s meme-makers manage to top themselves in incomprehensibility with this followup meme:

wat squared

How exactly these grocery shopping women play “a stronger role than men” in getting men elected I’m not sure.

Can you buy extra votes at the grocery store, or something? Or are men afraid that their wives/girlfriends/mothers will go on a grocery shopping strike and cause them to starve to death, because men can’t grocery or something?

I’m not sure — and the AVFM meme maker isn’t giving out any hints — but apparently the power wielded by these grocery ladies is awesome indeed:

Men! Save yourselves! You don’t have to eat your own children!

YOU CAN GO TO GROCERY STORES YOURSELVES.

I mean, it’s kind of boring, and eats up time you might otherwise spend sitting on the couch. But if you think about it, swinging by the grocery store on your way home from work and picking up a nice rotisserie chicken and some sides at the deli counter is probably less of a hassle than cooking an eating your own children, what with all the cleanup involved.

Comments

John Rew is of course referencing the famous “women tease politicians with unfulfilled promise of sex, make them eat their own babies” scandal that took place way back in the Shit That Never Happened era of American politics.

My personal guess is that the second meme is something about women being more likely to have voted for Obama, so Obama owes his position to them.

But of course, the women only voted for him cause they think he’s cute, cause ladybrains wouldn’t understood the issues. OH MY GOD OBAMA CUCKED THE ENTIRE (MALE) AMERICAN ELECTORATE. Or something. I have no idea if I’m using “cucked” properly, but I don’t imagine it matters.

It’s the old The Little Woman Gets Her Way argument against equality. “You gals don’t need power/money/jobs/respect/rights of your own! If you do your best to please us, we might be charmed enough to toss you scraps of what we have! And in a way, isn’t that better?”

A more apt comparison would be to say that the men in low-level government positions are in power like the women buying groceries are in power. It would also be more accurate to compare the men in top positions in government to the grocery chain owners (or, at least, general and regional managers). Furthermore, unlike with politics, grocery chains aren’t constantly sexually and otherwise harassing female shoppers, profiling/following/having other customers profile/follow all women who shop based on the fact that one or two of their gender who have been let into the store have shoplifted from them (regardless of how many men are shoplifters, or in the case of politics when it comes to this analogy, how many MORE men are), aren’t smearing them over the PA by making rude remarks about PMS, menstruation, and their supposed inability to satisfy their husbands, and other hostilities which would make them inclined to just give up on grocery shopping altogether. Grocery chains also are certainly NOT engaging in that behaviour towards men, as more and more men are entering stores to buy the groceries for their families. Grocery chains, unlike male-dominated fields, eagerly welcome more and more customers regardless of gender. None of the cashiers, managers, stock boys, or other customers, including women, bat a friggin’ eye.

Also, the gender gap in voters is still fairly small, and men certainly aren’t prevented by women or by politicians from stepping up and voting more, they have more than a third of their non-voting eligible voters they could rally to the cause (of course, they won’t, because MRAs run a negative campaign against women, and that’s about it), so claiming that women have (a bit) more power because your own gender is fucking lazy or too caught up in toxic masculinity to avoid committing crimes which result in a felony conviction is… pretty weak. It’s also about more than voting for a woman versus voting for a man. There are generally fewer women as candidates, and so the chance of finding a woman whose platform and style and overall personality you agree with are less. I would bet that male politicians are more likely to have financial and other backing for their campaigns than women, too, such as backing from other members of their party, who are predominantly other men… and backing from big business, also mostly run by men. Prominent female leaders in history and currently seem to be more likely to have gotten where they are through luck of heredity (such as monarchy, when there was no male heir) or privileged connections (I really doubt Hillary would have gotten as far as she has if she weren’t First Lady to a well-known and at least somewhat liked president, first. That’s not a comment on her skill relative to men, although I wouldn’t vote for her even if I were American, but you know she’d be less likely to be given the time of day if it weren’t for Bill). It’s more important to end discrimination against women in male dominated fields such as politics, and the misogyny of men and internalized misogyny of women created by centuries upon centuries of patriarchy, to level the playing field when it comes to female politicians’ chances of being elected, than it is to just tell more even women to vote.

…but of course, MRAs don’t think about these causal layers of the issue, because they’re simplistic creatures who probably spent more time in the timeout corner/principal’s office for antisocial behaviour than they did paying attention to any of their lessons in school. Okay, maybe their ears perked up at anything in science class that involved setting something on fire, I’ll give them that much credit, but that’s about it.

Unrelated to the post, but I saw a bumpersticker from A Voice For Men out in the wild today. Not on a car – someone had stuck it to a sign. I was rather disturbed to realize it meant some of these idiots are in my area.

i thought the guys “checking the smoke alarms” in the kitchen were a little strange (there are no smoke alarms in the kitchen; my people didn’t seem to notice that) but i never expected them to install cameras inside the damned stove or wherever

how dare you

(p.s. the bird was slightly undercooked i need to send my humans to the store to buy a food thermometer)

“I love how they completely ignore the existence of WoC. Its like we’re invisible. We don’t exist at all, except as punchlines to whatever points they want to make about White women. I’m guessing its a Hell of a lot harder to make that same argument using pictures of Black or Hispanic women.

Considering how nonsensical the above memes are you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to make a bad one involving WoC. Just write the usual gibberish, and throw some pictures on it.”

I have seen memes with one black boy being yelled at by a white woman “stop oppressing me!” And another meme with a woman in a burka “I thought I was oppressed until I discovered tumblr” and some other memes like that. They don’t care about people of color they’re just weapons to silence “their” women and girls it’s nothing more than an abusive tactic because a lot of them are abusers and rapists themselves and all they want is power and control. What I don’t understand is that if there are people who have it way worse why is there even a men’s rights movement in the USA to begin with? What a bunch of stupid hypocrites, just shot themselves in the feet they did.

“The world is there for your taking like never before in human history. Quit dreaming up pseudoscience and lies to excuse your failure to woman up and deal—
Or go make someone a freaking sammich.”

Mr. Jack Kammer:

I’m going to not go out on a limb here and say that–given that you’ve made a barely intelligible graphic using a substandard graphic program for a website run by a man who holds a monumental, unending, over-the-top grudge against women, despite the fact that the women in his life have supported him both financially and emotionally–YOU don’t have much power.

And why is that, Mr. Kammer?

The president is a man. Congress is mostly male. The pope is a man. Most generals are men. Ditto professors, scientists, ministers, and even top-paid artists.

So why don’t YOU have that kind of power?

Never mind. Just make me a sandwich. Extra mustard. Wash your hands first.

Lemme guess: Women make up slightly more than half the population, and since all women are white women of wealth, leisure and privilege, and no one is aggressively trying to suppress their ability to vote or gerrymander voting districts, and because (obviously) they all vote the same and also as a bloc, it is they who are responsible for electing everyone who currently holds political office?

Seriously, are all MRAs willfully ignorant 15-year-old boys, or is it just that they never pass that level of cognitive and intellectual development?

Also, don’t those two contradict each other as well? The first one says the guys in government don’t really have any power, then the second one says actually they do, but it’s just women that put them there. That doesn’t add up.

Apparently, politicians don’t have any real power if they have to pander to voters.

They’re probably referring to the fact that since the 1980s, women have been making up 64% of the voter turnout in US national elections.

The fuck? I understand why an MRA would be concerned about that, even if he’s unable to communicate the problem clearly, even less point out the correct reasons and propose constructive solutions.

I saw a bumpersticker from A Voice For Men out in the wild today. Not on a car – someone had stuck it to a sign.

Why out yourself as an MRA by putting those stickers on your car, when you can make the point by sticking them on someone else’s property?

Grocery stores are where you go to select food which you then pay for. All those men in government? Those are their jobs. Those positions belong to them. They are being given money to fill those shoes.

I take it these guys think women are financially rewarded for visiting grocery stores and taking food off shelves.

OK, I did a Google Image search on the left half of the first picture. The original is captioned “Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, 2013”

I think what he’s trying to say is that, despite all their power, these two men are in disagreement about what world policy towards Iran should be, so at least one of them is going to wind up disappointed. Meanwhile, the two women on the right are able to pick a basket of groceries that they’re both satisfied with.

So the author is asking us: Who really has the power in these two situations? (Answer: Everybody but Netanyahu, which is probably just as well.)

I think this is tying in to the common MRA complaint that women control 70% of consumer spending. (Or is it 80%? I always forget my MRAfax). Which does give women power; consumer power. Consumer power only slightly overlaps political power. However, given that these asshats are terrified of women having any power of any sort, I wouldn’t expect them to think long enough to make this distinction.

There are still plenty of cultures that won’t allow women to control more money than basically amounts to pocket change. It basically amounts to financial abuse; he who controls the purse strings, controls everyone else. MRA wet dream?

Of course, financial abuse doesn’t even get taken seriously in the US. “Cultural norms”, my ass.

@Alan Robertshaw: Didn´t The Master kill himself at the end of season 3 by refusing to regenerate????

He’s hard to kill. I can think of five situations in which it looked like the Master was killed, or trapped for all eternity, off the top of my head, but then in the next serial to feature him, up he pops and the Doctor doesn’t even question it.

I assume that the reasoning behind the first meme-image-attempt is that the men in question are just the most visible appendages of the true power, just as women grocery shopping are only a relatively visible part of the overall process of food acquisition. In both cases, one presumes, the real power is held by those who empower the visible people in question, which are, respectively, the disproportionately female voting bloc that put Obama in power and the disproportionately male set of income earners who are paying for groceries. So I guess it still contradicts itself.

The difference being that now that he’s in office, Obama can do what he likes and the voters can’t actually do anything about it (plus plenty of those voters were men, plus women don’t all agree, plus lobbyists, plus all the other politicians supported primarily by men, etc etc etc), whereas the female shoppers have the power to…buy food the men don’t like?

A better analogy would be that someone like the White House press correspondent is like women buying groceries. You might end up seeing a lot more of them, but they still don’t have any real power except to do the thing they were sent there to do.

Most of the men in power would cook and eat their own offspring if a woman told them to. Spineless.

Oddly enough, the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, and so on, don’t cave when I, a woman, communicate my wishes, none of which include violence. From what I hear, those in power are inclined to bend an ear toward the wishes of the Koch brothers, the banksters, generals, and so on.

And Mr. Rew, what’s really true is that some men–the MRA type, who hate women, children, and really everybody–might very well cook and eat their own offspring and have them for lunch if the children’s mother (and, very important, the law) didn’t stop them.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.